Saturday 14 February 2009

the testy foundling

Fill in the gaps with the correct phrase from below and ONLY THEN click on the “gap” box to check your answer.

find your tongue______find your feet_________find favour

find your bearings_______finders keepers, losers weepers



400 million miles an hour!
___________ Faster in kilometres!
___________________WHOOOOSH!
Hurtling down a transparent velvet-plasic tube that twisted its way through the cosmos, Olga from the Volga wished now that she hadn't pressed the 'Help' button inside the lift.
The lift had stuck between floors, and, not wanting to grow old and die there, she had pressed the 'Help' button only to find that the floor gave way and she was sucked into the 400 million mile-an-hour tube.

At first she had wondered if this wasn't some kind of new emergency escape service which brought her out at the bottom of the stairwell. A man had been working on the lift the other day, she had recalled. But no, once she'd seen the Milky Way whizz by, she'd and realised that it was unlikely to bring her out at the bottom of the stairwell. When this had sunk in, she would have screamed but, being a scientific kind of person, quickly realised that travelling at that speed she would never get to hear it. If anyone came after her down the tube, it would be an awful thing to come across - a disembodied howl.
No sooner had she thought this when, suddenly, she was sucked out of the end of the tube, with a sound like a leech going up a vacuum cleaner.
THWOOP!

Olga from the Volga fell on her hands and knees onto the bright white ground.
Where was she? Was she on a friendly planet? Would there be extra-terrestials? With laser guns? O dear. She needed to, quickly.
And then it occurred to her: could she even breathe the atmosphere? Goodness! She quickly held her breath.
Then she heard a noise like voices, coming from far off. She wondered if her ears had popped coming down the tube. What were they saying? It sounded like 'na halavu' - what strange language was that?
Suddenly an enormous hand, 50 times the size of Olga from the Volga scooped her up. 'It's mine, it's mine!' screamed the loudest voice Olga from the Volga had ever heard. 'I saw it first -!'
'You can have it,' boomed another voice. 'It's probably got a disease. It's face is red.'
Olga from the Volga had had enough. 'SHUT UP!' she screamed. 'STOP SHOUTING!'
'Oo, it can speak! It's! Did you hear that Pashmina?' A giant nose followed by enormous eyes came towards Olga from the Volga. A hot wind that smelt of borsch came out of the nose. 'You won't with us if you try and give us orders, you know,' the woman's ridiculously loud voice warned.
Hang on a minute, thought Olga from the Volga, trying to ignore the terrible din. A wind that smells like borsch: that could only mean one thing.
But how...?

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Collocation of the Week by Dr Myers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.